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Holiday Song Meaning ( See Actual Lyrics)
A song, especially a really good song, has a lot of different meanings. The lyrics to the Green Day song, "Holiday," are a perfect example of this. For starters, there's what the songwriter, Billy Joe Armstrong, thought it meant when he wrote it. Usually before Green Day plays this song in concert, Billie Joe says something to the effect of "This song is not anti-American, It's anti-war blah, blah ,blah, whatever."
So let's imagine for a minute that this song is supposed to be some kind of protest song against the war in Iraq. The lyrics to "Holiday" certainly support this theory. Lines like "Zieg Heil to the president gas man, / Bombs away is your punishment, / Pulverize the Eiffel towers, / Who criticize your government," are straight-up political. Obviously, the "Holiday" lyrics are suggesting that George Bush has become a sort of Hilter-esque figure by staging a war on terrorism to disguise his pursuit of oil ("Zieg Heil to the president gas man") as some sort of noble crusade. And anyone who refuses to join in this 'war,' and be a dog howling out the hymn of Faith and Misery, (i.e. France), becomes an enemy by default ("Pulverize the Eiffel towers, / Who criticize your government)".
On the other hand, this song is obviously part of the St. Jimmy plot that makes up the continuous storyline on the American Idiot album. At the end of "Jesus of Suburbia," the song before "Holiday," St. Jimmy leaves home. At the beginning of the "Holiday" lyrics, St. Jimmy is 'free' on the streets, on some kind of twisted version of a holiday, if you call being homeless and alone a 'holiday.' But the point is that St. Jimmy knows society is fucked up (It"s not a way that's meant for me, / Just cause, / Just cause because we're outlaws, yeah!") and he's happy not to be a part of it.
The song title, "Holiday," ends up becoming this kind of gruesome double-entendre for various forms of checked-outed-ness in modern life. You've got the 'holiday' of street people, punks, anarchists - all the completely disillusioned - and then you've got the 'holiday' of the illusory American-Dream style fantasy-land where everything is perfect and nothing bad is happening ("The shame, / The ones who died without a name").
Unfortunately, the whole idea of the 'holiday' in the song is a "hollow lie." The fun of this track is followed immediately by "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," in which St. Jimmy finds himself depressed and alone in the same shitty world he thought he could escape in "Holiday."* This second interpretation of the song doesn't pay much attention to politics, and reads Green Day's "Holiday" lyrics as just another chapter in the American Idiot 'punk-rock opera.'
There's a lot of controversy over which of these interpretations is right. It doesn't really matter what Billie Joe MEANT any more. The song meaning has now become what it means to the people who listen to it. The way it makes listeners think about and see the world is where the meaning gets developed. And that's a good thing, because Billie Joe probably doesn't even know exactly what he meant when he was originally writing it, and he probably meant a lot more than he knew he was saying. Which good writers always do, if you can dig it.
People like to bitch that the politics in this song are not very good. They're over-simplified, maybe, and too obviously Democratic. And partisan politics are NOT punk. The end. But because the "Holiday" lyrics are actually about political shit AND about the story of St. Jimmy, they can't be understood apart from each other, and together they make the whole meaning of the song very complicated.
Right at the beginning, the first line says, "Hear the sound of the falling rain, / Coming down like an Armageddon flame." This parallels the rain falling on the streets that St. Jimmy is walking with the rain of warfare coming down in the larger political environment that he is rotting away in. Clearly, this song contains two stories about the same thing.
The Jesus of Suburbia / St. Jimmy character is an Everyman type for the screwed-up modern world. He's disillusioned, out of touch, and pissed off about everything, but he also can't escape the fact that his fate is tied in with that of the rest of society. The personal IS political, as some brainy asshole once said.
The problem with our personal and political lives being inseparable, however, is that the average person feels totally unable to control the political, and, like St. Jimmy, just feels like a brainwashed pawn being pushed around and sacrificed to bloody-jawed corporate monsters and fat laughing bureaucrats, so to-hell-with-it-all. Sure, the right-wing wages wars and uses religion to push its ideals - "Can I get another Amen? (Amen!) / There's a flag wrapped around the score of men, / A gag, / A plastic bag on a monument" - but the left wing is also totally corrupt and greedy under all the peace-loving hippie bullshit - "Hear the drum pounding out of time, / Another protester has crossed the line, /To find the money's on the other side."
"Holiday" is the best kind of protest song, one where the protest comes from the actual lives of all those that "beg to dream and differ." Okay, okay, so maybe "Holiday" didn't start a revolution, but at least it got people thinking. It made some people really mad, and made a lot of people who previously thought that "Hollaback Girl" plundered the very deepest heart of society's riches start to think again about the world we live in, and how it works. Green Day just beat out Mariah Carey and Gwen Stefani to win the VH1 Big in '05 award for 'Artist that had the most impact in 2005.' Hmmm, I wonder why?
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